Ipswitch partnered with Mail-Filters.com to add anti-spam to its Ipswitch Collaboration Suite.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 14, 2005]

Lexington, Mass.-based Ipswitch partnered with San Mateo, Calif.-based Mail-Filters.com to add anti-spam to its groupware product, the Ipswitch Collaboration Suite (ICS).

The technology will be available in April of 2005 and current customers will receive the anti-spam feature upgrade as part of the Ipswitch service agreement.

"The product needs to be easy to use, but it needs to be tough on spam, like a candy with a hard outer shell," says Alex Niehaus, Ipswitch vice president of marketing.

Ipswitch chose Mail-Filters.com because the company maintains a 24x7 anti-spam center. "Unlike anti-virus, where a purely mechanical approach works (our anti-virus is carrier grade Symantec), we believe you need a human component to build an effective an anti-spam program."

Those tricky spammers
The Mail-Filters.com StarEngine (Spammer Tricks Analysis and Response Engine) technology is designed to be able to keep up with the anti-spam arms race, which spammers are clearly winning.

Spammer techniques the engine is designed to thwart include (according to the company's .pdf white paper Spam Filters Need The Human Touch):

• Hash Busting—The random insertion of characters or words intended by spammers to fool signature based filters.
  
  
• Snow-Flaking—An effort to make each HTML e- mail unique, like a snowflake, by inserting invisible characters or HTML comments into messages.
  
  
• Header Forging—Falsifying the header information on which many filters rely to identify spam.
  
  
• IP Hopping—Constantly changing the IP information to confuse filters based solely on lists.
  
  
• Misspelling—Deliberately misspelling words such as $ex, or V1agra.
  
  
• Embedded Content—Usually an HTML message that displays content pulled from a web page based on an embedded URL in the message. This gets by most spam filters.
  
  
• HTML E-Mail—Often used by spammers to display graphics and increase response rate. HTML e- mail is difficult for many filters to scan.

Niehaus says that the STAR Engine does not slow down his company's ICS for a simple reason. "The STAR Engine is a separate process that finds the spam. ICS simply asks the STAR Engine if an e-mail is spam and gets a yes or no answer."

The human touch
But the STAR Engine is not used alone. The company maintains a Bullet Signature Database of spam profiles designed by human editors. In its white paper, Mail-Filters.com writes, "Bullet Signatures are continuously updated by the Mail-Filters editors, usually within minutes of new spam hitting the Internet, to maintain their effectiveness and accuracy. Just the latest updates are transmitted to minimize download time."

"They have language skills to read spam in foreign languages and they proactively acquire spam in the normal ways, such as though honeypots and by encouraging their customers to send them spam," adds Niehaus.

"They're particularly interested in false positives," he adds. "We can send our false positives to another address."

So the system's not perfect—no anti-spam system is. If your business customers are frustrated with SpamAssassin or the blacklists, this will be a serious improvement for them.

—End